In the days since Reps. Peter DeFazio and Jason Chaffetz introduced their patent-troll-smashing SHIELD Act (Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes), there’s been a steady increase in attention and momentum, both in the press and among the public at large, to the issue of vexatious patent lawsuits.

Beloved podcasts like the Adam Carolla Show and HowStuffWorks are under attack. They and other podcasts are getting sued for, well, podcasting. And they're not the only victims—developers are being targeted for building mobile apps, and offices around the nation are being attacked for using ordinary networked scanners. These creators are only a few of the thousands of victims of one of the biggest threats to innovation: patent trolls.

This week brings promising news in the fight against patent trolls. We have written before about how a broken patent system has led to an explosion of lawsuits by patent trolls (companies that assert patents as a business model instead of creating products). In the hands of trolls, patents become a tax on innovation.

EFF is pleased to see the Indiegogo campaign page of Internet startup CentUp has returned after the page was briefly taken down in response to a complaint by a patent troll. We hope this takedown is not the start of a trend of patent trolls sabotaging startups by complaining to online intermediaries. And we applaud Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform crucial for financing many startups and projects, for doing the right thing and restoring the campaign.